Chapter 25 Wren
Twenty-Five
Wren
It takes Eryn less than ten minutes to dash into her house and shower off the last bit of her mermaid makeup following our
early—and thankfully only—mermaid-sighting tour of the day.
When she gets back into my truck, she leans over to give me a quick, almost perfunctory kiss. A hollowness hits me when I
realize I can’t remember how long it’s been since it felt like more than that from either of us.
“Aren’t we going to eat?” she asks when I don’t start the engine right away. “Because the brunch crowd is going to be intense
if we wait much longer.”
I’m not thinking about food though, and I think she can tell. She meets my gaze.
“The weekend is over. It’s done and dealt with. I’m not interested in rehashing any of it and I don’t need you to feel like
you have to overcompensate with me. We’re fine. Let’s go eat.” She gives me a smile that’s as close to normal as she can make
it, but it falls just short enough to speak louder than her words.
“Tell me something, Eryn.” My voice comes out quieter than I intended.
She pauses mid-buckle of her seatbelt, her hands stilling as she looks at me, waiting.
“Do you remember our first kiss?”
Her expression turns puzzled, not because she doesn’t remember but because I’ve never asked her this before.
She makes a halfhearted lunge for my phone when I pull it out.
“What? You’re the one who posted the video. Did you take it down?”
“No, because it was cute at the time, and it was the start of us.” But she stops trying to grab the phone away from me. “Fine,
but just know it’ll be super embarrassing.”
We have to scroll pretty far back in her feed through lots of mermaid and baking content, far more of the latter than the
former, before I tap the thumbnail showing me walking toward her on Brant Point Beach—because I could still walk then—just
after sunset with a pizza box in my hands. “Electric Love” by B?rns plays as the lighthouse looms in the background. I angle
the phone so Eryn can see the screen.
We were fifteen at the time, and we both look young in the video, especially me. Shirtless, barefoot, and with my hair so
overgrown that it was starting to curl at my neck. I looked like I didn’t have a care in the world, and back then, it was
true.
Eryn looks almost the same. Her straight black hair was shorter, but otherwise she’s even dressed almost the same today, in
a cropped white tank and cutoffs.
“Do we really want to watch this now?” She looks over despite her words.
The music is too loud to hear what we’re saying, and the golden hour had come and gone, so there are quite a few shadows too, but to my surprise, I remember it all too well. “I was asking you why your phone was set up to record.”
“And I told you I wanted some pictures of you, me, and Tate, but obviously, I never invited him.”
It was just the two of us alone on the beach, and for whatever reason, I had started to get that feeling like something was
off. I should have just asked her if something was wrong, but that level of maturity was beyond me at that point. I went for
the dumb joke instead.
I smile, watching myself try to be cool. “There I am, telling you they were out of pepperoni, so I got sardines instead. You
were so disappointed, but you still told me it was fine.” I laugh and shift the phone closer to her. “Look at the way you’re
frowning at the box.”
“I didn’t want to make you feel bad.”
I lift my gaze from the screen to stare at her profile, saying softly, “No, you never did, did you?”
The moment is coming then; I’d know it from the look on her face now, even without the musical cue in the video. I remember
telling her I was kidding about the pizza, and just as I was lifting the lid to show her, one of my best friends since kindergarten
grabbed my face and kissed me.
Beside me now, Eryn covers her face. “I can’t believe I did that.”
I couldn’t either. I didn’t have a clue that she liked me that way. In the video, she pulls away then runs out of frame and
I immediately take off after her. End of clip.
The comments under the video are full of heart eyes and plenty of romantic movie–level speculation on what happened when I
caught up with her.
I put my phone down. There’s no footage of what happened next, and we would’ve never posted it if there were.
I’d frozen when she first kissed me. There was nothing I expected less in that moment than Eryn’s mouth on mine, so I did
the worst thing I could’ve possibly done in her mind.
I didn’t kiss her back.
In hindsight, I should have seen something like that happening. We spent enough time together, and despite Tate and half the
school constantly teasing us, I’d just never looked at her that way, and before that night on the beach, I didn’t think she
looked at me that way either. I’d kissed a few other girls by that point, so it wasn’t the kiss itself that threw me, it was
the girl whose lips were pressed against mine. Eryn wasn’t any other girl, and in my head, I’d always categorized her as the
non-kissing kind. My brain couldn’t make the switch fast enough.
She hadn’t run far, so I caught up to her where the tide was sliding over our feet. She had her arms wrapped tightly around
herself, and I remember how close to tears she was.
I’d never seen her cry before, not really, but I knew instinctively that I didn’t ever want to be the cause. My brain still
wasn’t ready to move her into the kissing category, but I didn’t know what else to do.
So I kissed her.
It all just kind of happened after that. Me and Eryn.
And then I got hurt days later and everything changed. I barely saw how I was supposed to fit into my new reality, let alone how she would. But she surprised me then too.
She didn’t panic and run; she didn’t even gradually fade away like most of my other friends. She stayed. She was there for my dad and me even when I tried to push her away. And once I realized my life didn’t end with my wheelchair, she was still there.
And I . . . I know we wouldn’t have made it without her.
I take her hand now, startling her out of her remembered embarrassment, and tell her, “I can’t imagine these past four years
without you.”
She tucks her wet hair behind her ear with her free hand. “Me either.”
Her smile has real warmth to it this time, but it fades when my phone dings and we both see the text that comes through.
Lili: Whatever you’re doing, stop and call me right now.